[Tom Grubisich is a former managing editor of news for Digital City/AOL and a regular contributor to OJR. Today, he offers his ideas on how the once-dominant online publisher can regain its momentum.
In the weeks to come, we would like to feature more dot-com veterans’ takes on how other once-dominant online publishers can turn things around. If you are interested in writing such a piece, please contact OJR editor Robert Niles at editor – at – www.ojr.org.]
Reviving AOL may be as big a challenge as making a Marc Jacobs purse out of a sow’s ear. But AOL still has about 10 million subscribers. Ten million! Any other site would die for that number.
AOL’s subscribers are voracious consumers of pages. But as AOL now chases after other users all over the Web in another of its frenetic but behind-the-curve strategies, those 10 million monthly fee payers are treated as stepchildren, if not orphans.
They get zilch. Why doesn’t AOL woo these long-suffering loyalists with richer content, particularly news that will give them a reason not to finally opt out — like 20 million other AOL subscribers since 2002?
With its new myAOL, AOL now invites everybody, including subscribers, to create a tailored “start” page of news from baskets of sources or RSS feeds. But myAOL does no more than copy other, earlier personalized sites, like Yahoo, netvibes, pageflakes and iGoogle.
Why doesn’t myAOL take personalization to the next, logical level – let users not only choose a news provider, but also specific subjects?
I’d go to myAOL in a one-click heartbeat if it gave me a start page that scoured the Internet every day for stories about climate change, Sunni-Shiite relations in Iraq, certain movie directors like David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson, and other subjects that I follow closely. I suspect many Internet users have their own special news interests.
Sure, give me a box on today’s biggest headlines — like presidential primaries — but in today’s wraparound news environment (radio, TV, cellphone, print, not to mention my omnivorous Web browsing), I see and hear those same commodified headlines many times during my 16 waking hours. I’m sure many other people go through a similar experience.
My ideal start page would not only bring me specific news — text, photos, videos — but also make it easy for me to share it with friends (that I would arrange in clusters on a social widget a la Facebook).
The widget would let me and friends discuss the story, and, if we wanted, do something in response (send a letter to elected officials, get together for a meeting, etc.).
Personalization at this level would require AOL to develop or at least tweak some search algorithms so it could find and send me my news however arcane and wherever it resides in cyberspace — say, the transcript of a new hearing by Rep. Henry Waxman’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on the impact of proposed mega-coal-fired energy plants (I would also expect AOL not to send me five different versions of one story, which would be easy enough to avoid.)
Personalization taken to this level is not the “Daily Me” echo chamber detailed so worrisomely in a recent Financial Times opinion piece. It would bring to your computer news you want, but not necessarily news you are happy about.
If myAOL granted me my news wishes, I would reward it with loyalty. My social-network friends — some of them, anyway — might decide to make myAOL their start page too. Other Internet users might find their way to myAOL — through tagging, clouds and all the other prompts of Web 2.0.
A myAOL that did these things could help web 2.0 achieve its grand but unrealized mission — making the Internet an agent of change — not just in stock valuations but in our civic life.
It’s just possible that AOL could turn its sow’s ear into a purse. Perhaps not a Marc Jacobs. But how about a Michael Kors?
About Tom Grubisich
